Читать книгу Managing Patients: The Patient Experience Guidelines for Pratctice Success - American Dental Association - Страница 6

ADA Guidelines for Practice Success™ (GPS™)

Introduction

Your ability to communicate with patients impacts their perception of your practice. Managing that perception is critical to providing patients with ethical, personalized, high-quality care that maintains, or improves, their oral health and their overall health and well-being. It’s also an important factor in developing and fostering a trusting relationship based on mutual respect that can last for decades.

The Patient Experience: What It Is and Why It Matters

The best way to understand the importance of your patients’ experience with your practice is to put yourself in their shoes. Consider these questions, not as a dentist, but as a patient:

• What would you want and expect from your dentist?

• What would you want and expect from the members of the dental team?

• What makes a dental visit a positive experience, even if the treatment or care provided involves discomfort?

• What makes you willing to return to the same practice?

The answers to those questions can make a huge difference in your ability to develop positive relationships with your patients. When they are considered from both a personal and a business perspective, those answers can affect your no show, cancellation and case acceptance rates, patient referrals, and treatment plans.

Dental care has been driven by preventive and restorative treatment, and the foundation of every clinical procedure you recommend and perform is built on the relationship you’ve established with each patient. Like the team of dental professionals supporting you in providing care, your patients are part of your dental family. From the first phone call to the completion of the treatment plan, your ability to successfully communicate with patients will determine how effectively you meet their expectations. Good communication is the cornerstone of any successful practice.

Good communication is the cornerstone of any successful practice.

The Managing Patients module of the American Dental Association’s Guidelines for Practice Success™ (GPS™) details aspects of patient management via four major topics that offer a framework for handling some of the elements of communication that can make or break the patient experience.